Hard to just say 'no' to marijuana-growing tenants

Carol Lloyd

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, May 27, 2007

"It was a nightmare," says landlady Kyla Brooke of renting out a house in West Sonoma County. "They completely trashed the house -- they covered the floors with plastic, changed the electricity, added fans. They were pouring corrosive chemicals down the pipes. In the end, the walls were covered with mold. And then they threatened to sue us -- for mold." She pauses. "It had been a house in mint condition. If my husband hadn't been a contractor -- the damage they did would have cost us $25,000 or more."

In the pantheon of real estate nightmares, finding that your home or apartment has been turned into a marijuana "grow room" should qualify any landlord for a seat at the head of the table. Yet as medical marijuana laws have spawned a population of legitimate customers seeking respite from chronic illnesses, and police forces increasingly crack down on outdoor farms, more marijuana operations are going undercover in a residential neighborhood near you. With high-powered sun-spectrum lighting, new ventilation systems and seeds adapted to interior growth, grow rooms are springing up everywhere -- in rural country cabins, suburban tract homes and urban apartments.

Complicating the issue is that laws relating to pot growing tend to dwell in a gray zone between county, city, state and federal jurisdictions. The federal government still maintains that growing, using and distributing marijuana is a crime, despite the fact that a few states have passed medical marijuana laws.

Even within medical marijuana states where card-carrying patients are allowed to grow pot for their own use, the shades of gray vary, depending on the local government's interpretation of how many plants or pounds of product constitute acceptable personal use. What's more, some local governments -- like Ukiah -- have prohibited outdoor growing, indirectly encouraging more indoor growing.

"It's not a moral issue for most landlords," says Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association. "But it puts the landlord in a difficult place." She says that she had a colleague who discovered that his tenant had turned an apartment in San Francisco into a grow room after the Department of Building Inspection cited the landlord for illegal wiring. "(My colleague) had no right to ask the tenant to leave, but (city officials were) going to take him to court," she says. "Sometimes our elected officials try to do a positive thing, but legally the circle's not always closed. For instance, they had never talked to (the building department) about procedural issues."

Amid all these issues, landlords like Brooke are discovering one downside to the vague new marijuana laws. Whether the grow room was created to treat a grandmother ailing from cancer or a cartel of dealers, transforming a home into a indoor farm takes a serious toll. One neighbor of mine, who rented his home to the wrong tenants, found the entire house outfitted with a sprinkler system. Growers have also been known to rip out interior walls to create open greenhouses or to construct smaller air- and light-tight rooms within a house or garage. The most prevalent alterations include amping up the electrical system to provide for extra lighting, which, if not done properly, can create serious fire hazards. Pesticides and marijuana residue flushed down toilets can have a corrosive effect and ultimately require replacement of pipes. Wall-to-wall carpets can get seeded -- so that, as Brooke put it, "they (sprout) seeds for the rest of their life."

Security concerns sometimes exacerbate the damage: To prevent nosy neighbors from reporting the bright lights and ganja aromas to the police, tenants often cover the windows with black plastic -- completely sealing off the space -- and creating an environment ideal for mold, especially with a sprinkler system.

Sound too extreme to be believed? Peruse articles in publications such as Cannabis Culture to learn how the pros create indoor farming, including choosing the right location, buying lighting and installing ventilation.

Just how big is the issue of residential homes being turned into indoor pot farms? It's hard to say. Some landlords I spoke to said they'd never heard of the problem, while others had just recently begun hearing stories from fellow property owners or experiencing their own pot-farming tenants.

In British Columbia, where there's a powerful pot industry and relatively loose marijuana laws, the real estate industry recently added mandatory disclosure forms specifically requiring sellers to disclose whether the house had ever been used for growing marijuana, mostly because of potential mold issues. In the Sacramento Valley, police recently discovered a real estate agent who had made selling homes to pot dealers his niche market.

In the end, Brooke counted herself as "very lucky" for many reasons. "We were really lucky our house wasn't burned down," she says of the substandard electrical system. She also felt fortunate to get rid of the tenant without a legal battle. "He ended up getting arrested," she says. "But he threatened to sue us."

Indeed, when their property becomes the site of a professional operation, many landlords become more concerned about harm to people, not property. A friend of mine, who declined to be named because she is still in the process of getting her tenant out, expressed concern about returning the deposit. Recently, she'd gone from thinking his was a small-time solo gig to believing it was part of a more organized operation run by a boss who had taken over several houses in the area. "I put new floors in and heard he brought in a bunch of pit bulls," she told me. "But part of me just wants to give him his money and get him out of my life. I don't want any retaliation."

Brooke, a real estate agent and marriage and family therapist in the Russian River area, says discovering one's property is being used for marijuana cultivation isn't as cut-and-dried as it might seem. "It's a very complicated issue," she says. "There's a wide, growing support for medical marijuana, and some landlords are comfortable with growing on their property. But growing marijuana is still a felony, and there's a possibility that the landlord could be arrested, so it's a huge liability issue." And if a neighbor or some other party decides to sue over the presence of a grow room, "The landlord is more likely to be sued than the tenant."

She says she'll be more careful when renting to those tenants who fit what she sees as the grower profile. "They tend to be nice, clean-cut young men with a story about their credit," she says. "They also often pay cash." She says that because many people in her area have complex credit histories and also pay cash, these tenants actually look like good prospects. "Generally, they look like very desirable tenants with a couple of oddball issues."

Gary Harris, a real estate agent and property manager in Forestville, says he's encountered two grow rooms in the past couple of months: one in a home he was managing and another in a sale where he was the buyer's agent. Harris says that his rental contracts already stipulate that tenants cannot modify the property, but he too will be more alert to the tenants themselves. "The (grower) was not a typical tenant. So next time I think would check out their histories more."

Brooke has added language to her rental contract. "It says flat out there is to be no pot growing in the house. And I tell them I am responsible for smoke detectors -- I will come and examine them on a regular basis. I've always been a good landlord and now I've become an even better one."

Yet what works in one county might not work in another. According to Janan New, such additional clauses may not be enforceable, especially in a rent-controlled town like San Francisco. "You can't screen on this -- that would be illegal," she says, adding that even the presence of a grow room might not warrant eviction. "Damaging a property would be considered part of grounds for a nuisance eviction. But in San Francisco, the damage has got to be pretty egregious."